Opsophagia: How Ancient Greeks Judged a Man by His Fish

A Greek meal had two parts, and Greek moralists cared a great deal about the balance between them. The first was sitos, the staple: barley cakes or wheat loaves. The second was opson, whatever was eaten with the staple to give it taste. Paul Shorey, translating Plato, glosses opson as “anything eaten with bread, usually meat or fish.”¹ Older English versions often called it “relish.”

Too much opson had its own name. A man who ate it greedily was an opsophagos, an “opson-eater,” and his vice was opsophagia. The word sounds like a joke about table manners, and sometimes it was. But in classical Athens it also carried a political charge, because the most prized opson of all was fresh fish, and fish was expensive.

Bread first: what counted as opson

Plato’s Republic shows how basic the division was. In Book 2, Socrates imagines the simplest possible city, whose citizens bake “noble cakes and loaves” from barley and wheat and eat them reclining on beds of myrtle. Glaucon interrupts: “No relishes apparently,” he said, “for the men you describe as feasting.” Socrates agrees to add some: salt, olives, cheese, onions and boiled country greens.¹ Opson, in other words, could be very modest. Shorey notes that Glaucon means meat or fish, but that Socrates gives the word a different sense, as his humble list shows.¹

The same book records an ancient puzzle about Homer. Socrates observes that Homer’s heroes, camped by the sea, are never feasted on fish or boiled meat, only roast meat, the easiest food for soldiers to prepare.¹ Plutarch’s speakers return to the point centuries later: the heroes encamped by the Hellespont “abstained from fish.”² For Greeks of the classical and Roman periods, the fish-free diet of the heroic age made a contrast with their own appetites. (For another ancient meal in which the bread itself became the plate, see Virgil’s story of Aeneas eating the tables.)

Socrates and the young man who forgot his bread

The fullest early discussion of the opsophagos is a short chapter of Xenophon’s Memorabilia (3.14), a collection of conversations with Socrates written in the early fourth century BCE. It opens at a shared dinner to which each guest brought his own opson. When some brought a little and others a lot, Socrates told the servant to pool the small contributions or divide them equally. The guests who had brought a lot were embarrassed into pooling their own as well, and since they gained nothing by it, they stopped spending heavily.³

Then Socrates noticed a young man who had stopped eating bread and was eating his opson on its own. He raised a question of definition with the company: since everyone eats opson with bread when there is some, what is it that earns a person the name opsophagos? The group agrees that eating opson without bread, for pleasure rather than for athletic training, qualifies. A guest adds the case of a man who eats a scrap of bread with a large helping of opson, and Socrates accepts him too. In Marchant’s translation, Socrates adds: “Aye, and when others pray for a good wheat harvest, he, presumably, would pray for a good meat supply.” The Greek contrasts polykarpia, plenty of crops, with polyopsia, plenty of opson.³

The young man took the hint and picked up some bread, without putting down his opson. Socrates was not satisfied: “Watch the fellow, you who are near him, and see whether he treats the bread as his meat or the meat as his bread.”³

Xenophon’s Socrates then criticizes a different habit, tasting several dishes with each mouthful. Such a diner, he argues, spends more than the cooks and undoes their work by mixing what they keep apart, and he grows dependent on variety, so that he feels deprived when only one dish is served. The chapter ends with a pun. Socrates said the Athenian word for feasting well, euocheisthai, meant simply eating, and that the “well” applied to food that harmed neither body nor soul and was easy to come by.³ Opsophagia here is a failure of proportion: a man lets the extra become the meal.

Why fish became the test case

Opson could be onions or cheese, but in practice the word drifted toward fish. Plutarch, writing around the turn of the second century CE, sets one of his Table-Talk debates at the spa town of Aedepsus in Euboea, where the question was whether land or sea supplies better food. Polycrates argues from custom: just as one excellent poet is called simply “the poet,” so fish alone, or above all others, has come to be called opson. He adds that people are not branded gluttons for loving beef, figs or grapes, “but those who frequent the fish-market, and soonest hear the market-bell.”² The historian James Davidson cites this passage for the claim that fish had “triumphed over all others at the table.”⁴

The reasons were partly practical. In his review of Davidson’s book Courtesans and Fishcakes (1997),⁵ the papyrologist Peter Parsons summarizes the ecology. Apart from migrating tuna and anchovies, the Mediterranean fishes poorly; catches are seasonal and uncertain; fresh fish spoils, so it had to be bought quickly and dearly, while salted fish traveled in jars across the ancient world.⁶ Plutarch’s Polycrates makes the cost argument himself, citing Cato’s complaint that at Rome a fish sold for more than an ox.² Parsons puts the result neatly: “fish did loom large: it was the gourmet food, and therefore the social indicator.”⁶

Athenaeus and the catalogue of fish-lovers

Most of what survives about famous fish-lovers comes from Athenaeus, whose Deipnosophists (“Dinner-table philosophers,” around 200 CE) stages a learned banquet at which the guests quote earlier literature about food. Book 8 contains a long run of anecdotes about opsophagoi, mostly drawn from Athenian comedy and from collections of witty sayings. In C. D. Yonge’s 1854 translation, the Greek label is rendered “epicure.”⁷

The list is a gallery of comic types. Callimedon was nicknamed Carabus, “the Crayfish,” and a speaker in a comedy by Antiphanes declares that it would be harder to change his mind than to get Callimedon to pass up the head of a fish. The orator Hyperides is said to have walked through the fish market first thing every morning. The poet Antagoras was caught by King Antigonus boiling conger eels in camp and was asked whether Homer had cooked congers while writing about Agamemnon; he replied by asking whether Agamemnon had spent his time asking who was cooking congers. Androcydes, a painter, loved fish so much that he painted with great care the fish around Scylla.⁷ Plutarch tells the Antagoras and Androcydes stories too, which suggests a shared stock of anecdotes.²

Some stories escalate into fable. The poet Philoxenus of Cythera supposedly ate an octopus two cubits long, all but the head, fell ill, and on being told he had hours to live asked for the rest of it.⁷ Philosophers appear on both sides. Aristippus, a follower of Socrates, was reproached by Plato for buying fish; he said they had cost two obols, and when Plato said he would have bought them at that price, Aristippus replied that he was no epicure, but Plato was a miser. The Stoic Zeno, sharing a table with a notorious fish-lover, took a whole large fish for himself and then asked: “What do you think, then, that those who live with you must suffer every day, if you cannot endure my being a glutton for a single day?”⁷ And a man named Phoenicides, serving fish to guests who had brought contributions to a shared dinner, said that “the sea was common, but that the fish in it belonged to those who bought them.”⁷ The remark is the exact reverse of Socrates’ pooling rule in Xenophon.

These are jokes and anecdotes, many recorded centuries after the people they mock. They show what Greeks found funny and shameful about appetite. They are not reliable biography.

From greed to politics

Why should one man’s appetite concern anyone else? Davidson’s answer, as Parsons summarizes it, is that in democratic Athens private consumption was a public matter.⁶ A citizen who could not govern his desires might be ready to sell out his city to pay for them. Plutarch’s Polycrates recalls Demosthenes’ charge that Philocrates had spent the gold he received for betraying Athens on prostitutes and fish.² Athenaeus repeats the same accusation of courtesans and fish.⁷ Parsons quotes a line from Aristophanes in which a sprat-seller watching a man buy perch remarks, “This fellow seems to buy his fish with a view to Tyranny.”⁶ He also describes Davidson’s use of Aeschines’ speech Against Timarchus, which portrays an opponent who has eaten through his inheritance and links runaway appetite to brigandage and to plots against the democracy.⁶

Comedy made the charge personal. Davidson notes that in the spring of 421 BCE all three comedies competing at the festival of Dionysus attacked the tragic poet Melanthius for his love of fish, and that in Archippus’ play The Fishes the fish offer peace to humanity on condition that Melanthius is handed over to them in chains.⁴ Athenaeus preserves the same Archippus joke.⁷ Before the book, Davidson had published an article titled “Fish, Sex and Revolution in Athens” (1993) and a study titled “Opsophagia: revolutionary eating at Athens” (1995).⁸⁹

Was Athens really obsessed with fish?

Not everyone accepts the full picture. Parsons cautioned that much of the evidence survives only because Athenaeus chose to quote it, and that even so the fishy passages may represent only a small share of what the comic poets wrote. He asked how British society would look “if its historians focused on an anthology of literary references to cod and caviare.”⁶

Davidson replied in a letter published four weeks later. His argument, he wrote, did not rest on counting references: “It is not that fish looms so large in Greek comedy, it is that fish dominates the category of gourmandise.” He pointed to attacks on public figures for loving fish in texts that survive independently of Athenaeus, such as Aristophanes’ Peace, and to the passionate language Greek writers used about eels and other prized fish, which were sometimes described as goddesses.⁴

Both points can stand. Athenaeus is a selective witness, and comedy exaggerates. But the core texts do not depend on him. Xenophon’s Socrates defines the opsophagos by the ratio of bread to relish, and Plutarch’s dinner guests treat fish as the very meaning of opson.³² Across five centuries of Greek writing, the question of how much opson a person took, and of what kind, remained a quick way to judge whether he could govern himself.

Footnotes

1. Plato, Republic 2.372b-c and 3.404b-c, trans. Shorey, with Shorey’s notes (Perseus). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

2. Plutarch, Table-Talk 4.4, trans. Goodwin 1874 (Perseus). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

3. Xenophon, Memorabilia 3.14.1-7, trans. Marchant (Perseus); Greek text checked for opsophagos and polyopsia. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

4. Davidson, letter, London Review of Books 19(20), October 16, 1997. ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. Davidson 1997 (catalog record; publication details also in Parsons’s review). ↩

6. Parsons, London Review of Books 19(18), September 18, 1997. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

7. Athenaeus, Deipnosophists Book VIII, chs. 24-35, trans. Yonge (Perseus). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

8. Davidson 1993, Classical Quarterly 43(1) (Crossref record). ↩

9. Wilkins, Harvey and Dobson 1995 (catalog record; chapter not read). ↩